Posts tagged startups

The Actual Cost of Meetings And How To Be More Awesome At Them

On Thursday, I posted about how meetings can easily take up a huge chunk of one’s time. Meetings are a very necessary part of doing business, however not all meetings are directly conducive to actual work. They are for that dirty, dirty word: “networking.”

But I know this as well as anyone and I’ve leveraged intros and connections from one person to the next in a beautifully serendipitous discovery of great people in the startup ecosystem.  I wouldn’t be where I am today if it weren’t for all of the awesome people who have helped along the way and I try to honor that help by paying it forward as best I can.

So, let’s break down the actual cost of “a quick meeting” and I’ll drop some tips on how to effectively get meetings with busy people, make the most of that potential relationship, and together, we’ll make this process better for everyone… 

Pre-meeting

• Scheduling. Most likely over email… it’s a pain in the ass and no, Tungle.me, has not made it easier for anyone. If you take more than a few emails to schedule, you’re sucking. Tip: Offer exact windows of time to start. How is Mon 3-5pm, Tue 10-12 or Thu 1-4pm?
• Travel time. If a meeting requires someone to leave their office, that means looking up location, getting there and back. Tip: If you request the meeting, be willing to play an away game. If you have to meet in the middle, find a great location. Pro tip: Pick the favorite place of your intended target. ie. - Don’t askBrad Feld to meet at Shake Shack (he’s a pescatarian).
• Doing research before. I do at least some basic research before every meeting I have and I think all people should. This is the way to get the most out of a meeting. Usually it’s to get to know someone else’s product/offering so I can offer advice, but sometimes it’s just to see what’s new in their life so I can be on point. If I don’t know what we’re meeting about, be ready to ask some pointed questions to steer the convo, but be ready for me to go “ummmm… let me think about that.” Tip: Do your research in advance so you have a chance to make a real connection with someone. Super pro tip: Never use the phrase “pick your brain” or “compare notes.” SO VAGUE and abused. 

During

• Allotted time. In theory, this is just the actual cost of the meeting time - an allotted 30 minutes or an hour usually - but these often go long for one reason or another. That’s not fair to the person you’ve asked for a meeting. Keep meetings to your allotted time, or better, finish a few minutes early so they get a few minutes of their day back.
• Defined agenda. I’m not saying you need an itinerary or that your meeting needs to only be about business - connecting personally is important - just don’t waste all of the time BS’ing around, especially if you know the other person has 1000 other things on their plate.

Post-meeting

• Follow up. Most meetings have some sort of follow up exchange (if they don’t, you’re not doing it right). These usually take the form of an ask for an intro or some other exchange over email, but it requires at least one person to do some work for you. Tip: Make it easy. Follow up quickly with a “thank you. I’m going to do ABC and will follow up IN A SEPARATE THREAD about XYZ.” Then… do that. Sending a well crafted email in a separate thread that they can easily forward to ask for an intro for you makes it 10x more likely that they’ll help you out.
• Follow-up follow-up [sic]. Once you’ve connected with that other intro, let the original introducer know and thank them. This goes a long way to show that when they help you, you’ll follow up and do it right.

As you can see, the actual cost of a meeting can easily add up where Time = (pre-meeting + meeting + post-meeting x #asks), so it’s important that we all know and respect one another’s time as we help each other build the greater startup ecosystem and do more faster.

What else can we do about it?

• Phone calls. While I admit that face to face meetings are better than phone calls, I love taking calls while walking or driving. Some of my best connections with other entreps started this way.
• Meal meetings. Breakfast/lunch meetings are great. If you really want someone’s time, you can offer to take them to lunch. That being said, realize that some people simply don’t have an hour for lunch or they use that time to hang with their team (I do). 
• Moving meetings. I haven’t done a ton of these, but I think they’d be fun. Either sharing someone’s commute or going for a run can be a cool creative way to find time. I’ve done both. 

Scheduling

As of Monday, my schedule for today looked like this:

• 8:30-9AM Daily meeting w/Dan
• 10AM VC meeting
• 1-1:30PM Engineering scrum

As of today, it looks like this: 

• 8:30-9AM Daily meeting w/Dan
• 10AM VC meeting
• 11AM Strategy meeting
• 12:30PM Lunch meeting
• 1-1:30PM Engineering scrum
• 2-2:30PM Phone call w/HR service
• 3-5PM Meeting with/board member
• 5-7PM UX Session

I’m at my computer and functional by 8AM, and anyone who knows me, knows I generally don’t leave the office until late… way late.

My point is not to belabor how busy I am (we all are), but to demonstrate why I’m fighting back against inbound meeting requests (as part of my #12experiments). Even when I can keep inbound stuff off my calendar, my attention is still needed in a bunch of other places and it gets scheduled quickly/on the fly.

So if you’ve asked for a meeting recently and I’ve declined, please realize it’s not you, it’s me.

[Update: Just got another meeting request from a teammate for 2-2:30pm… sigh.]

p.s. - Luckily, today I only have to leave the office for one of these meetings, but traveling is a huge time suck. Will post about the true cost of a meeting tomorrow perhaps.

Foundation 01 with Jack Dorsey

Yesterday morning I woke up, grabbed my iPad and caught up on some videos on Shelby, in particular this Kevin Rose ”Foundation” interview of Jack Dorsey.

Sure, the video is more than two years old, but that doesn’t mean Jack isn’t still really inspiring to startup guys like me. [Further, I love the long tail of video. Mark Cuban argues that online views are not the equivalent of TV views (he’s probably right), but I think that long tail of video discovery is a beautiful thing for new audiences].

In the interview, I was struck by two things that Jack said that really hit home with a few of my core beliefs…

1. Jack says we will start to see ‘more real-time filters.’ Again, this was two years ago, so we’ve already seen tons of services pop up around this, but I think this trend will continue and the definition of a ‘real-time filter’ will evolve as some will be features of larger services (Summify was just bought by Twitter for example) while others may stand alone (ahem… Shelby.tv… for example). 

2. Jack mentions ‘recognizing fortunate situations.’ For anyone who’s read this blog for a while, you know I love to remind people that “Luck is when preparation meets opportunity”, so Jack’s statement rings true with me. There is tremendous opportunity opening up around us everyday. It’s your job to put yourself in a position to take advantage of that. As I tell my team, we are really fortunate in terms of our timing for Shelby.tv and I couldn’t be happier about that.

If you’ve got 30 minutes today, watch the interview. And if you don’t have the time, just mark it to ‘watch later’ on Shelby. ;)

8 tips for a kickass Saturday at work

I’m just going to come out and say it - I love working on the weekend. Maybe it’s because I was trained for it growing up in the restaurant business (weekends = $). Maybe it’s because my high school had Saturday classes or because weekends meant game-day in college. Or maybe it’s just because weekends generally mean no meetings, no phone calls, no interruptions. Yeah… that might have something to do with it…

But not everyone’s wired like me and it’s sometimes hard to motivate to work on a Saturday, so here are some pro tips for having a productive day at work on the weekend.

1. REST

Get sleep on Friday night. For me, that means 8 hours. I function fine on 6, but 8 really has me rested and ready to charge hard. Doesn’t hurt to take it easy on the booze Friday night, too. 

2. REFLECT

Take some time to get inspired with some reading, reflection etc to get your brain warmed up and ready to go. It’s just good for you. I started today with an interview of Jack Dorsey.

3. FUEL UP

Get a good healthy meal in you so you won’t get hungry easily later. Bring dinner/next meal with you. Get a giant jug of water so you don’t have to get up for a drink.

4. CAFFEINATE

I know everyone has their struggles with caffeine. I generally stay away from it, but if you don’t consume it daily, it is a great way to supercharge when you want to crank.

5. CHANGE YOUR SEAT

I love our office and my usual standing desk, but today I opted to sit in the engineering room (thanks Henry). If you don’t have that option, then hit a coffee shop or something. The change of setting is fun and pulls you away from the crap at your desk that can distract.

6. IGNORE

Your phone. IM. Etc. Duh.

7. EXERCISE

Get some. Sometimes I get this done in the morning, though I prefer later in the day as a way to get me up and out of my seat and get the blood flowing for a second wind. 

8. TIMING IS EVERYTHING

Answering email on weekends is awesome because almost no one responds right away and usually by Monday the email doesn’t need a response. I also like to do big whiteboarding exercises on the weekend when no one can interrupt and influence.

—

None of this is rocket science and none of these will fix a job that you hate, but most of us startup people love what we do already, so this stuff should be fun, exciting, challenging, hawtsome anyway. And despite my lack of a degree in rocket science, I think these tips will probably work any day of the week (except maybe changing your seat… I dunno if Henry would like me stealing his seat during the week).

Yours in productivity,

reece

Relativity of speed

This morning I decided our ugly office door had been an ugly office door for too long. I told Lauren I wanted to paint it black and get a Shelby sign made for it.

By the time I got out of our board meeting, Lauren had a sweet concept for how to lay-out our logos (ours and our officemates). By the time we finished eating and a quick game of ping pong, Vincent had the logos all done up… oh, and he had a friend with a laser cutter who could make us a stencil. Sweet.

Dan finished his day by hitting Home Depot for some supplies we needed and picked me up some paint. An hour later, my hands are covered in paint, but our door is painted black and ready for some sweet logo action tomorrow.

This story in and of itself, isn’t that interesting… but Lauren’s comment to me as I applied the second coat stood out…

“I’m still amazed at how fast we get shit done. At [my old job], there would’ve been a meeting to decide IF we should paint the doors, and THEN what color and so on…” 

Lucky for me, I never worked for a big company. I don’t know anything about setting up planning committees. I’ve never had more than one person to ask permission to do something (and they usually just said, “yeah, don’t even ask next time.”)

So for me, this feels pretty normal. For Lauren, it is light-speed (and she loves it). Point is, speed is relative. And sure, I’m talking about painting a door - a trivial decision - but the speed with which we executed was awesome, that’s how it should be in a startup and that’s how we roll when it comes to decision making in general.

Respect all. Fear none.

This bracelet is from my local gym in my hometown and was given to me by the owner’s nephew (who was hustling everyone in the place one $2 sale at a time. Love it). 

The phrase itself isn’t that original, but it stuck with me as we (Shelby.tv) are generally in the midst of a competitive space AND this week in particular we are at the Consumer Electronics Showcase alongside thousands of other companies all vying for the world’s attention.

The message - “Respect all. Fear none.” is clear. Common sense even… but often forgotten. Let’s break it down…

Respect all.

This really is common sense, but it’s easy to forget. It usually happens one of a few ways. 

1. The competition is bigger than you and you say “they’re big and slow and can’t innovate and we’re going to f*ck them up.”
2. The competition is smaller than you and you say “ha! yeah right… they’ll never catch us.”
3. The competition is the same size as you and you say “so what if they have feature X… we’ve got a better team anyway…”

Justify it any way you want, all of these ways of thinking are stupid and lazy. When it comes to competition, the best way to approach it is as if you’re losing, regardless of whether you actually are. Treat every competitor with tons of respect and realize that it really is Any Given Sunday out there.

Fear none.

But! When competitor A launches X feature, hires Y engineer or gets Z press hit… all you need to do is see it, understand it, say “GAME ON” and then… GET. BACK. TO. THE GAME. To be clear, I’m not saying to blindly ignore it, and I’m certainly not saying to obsess about it. Just know what it is and then forget about it and build your vision. 

Getting caught up in the tit-for-tat game of competition is a surefire way to build crap and it’s really just not worth your mental bandwidth to think about the bad guys.

So believe in yourself, while being realistic and get back to kicking ass.

Building in a bubble

[originally meant to post yesterday]

I’ve said before that it’s easy to get hopped up drinking your own startup Kool-Aid. You’re sitting around with great people, rapping about an idea and everyone feels the energy and says “yeah YEAH YEAH! Let’s do it!”

When it comes to building a product… that’s a death sentence.

Or is it?

On the one hand, when you build, write, or create in an insulated environment, you’re guaranteed purity of thought. Your thoughts are your own. Your ideas are yours. They are untested in the outside world, but the product is that which you want it to be and only you can screw up your own vision. 

On the other, when you venture out into the world, when you speak with real people, when you (as a techie) observe behavior of “normals,” “n00bs,” and dare I say it - MOST of the people on this planet, you realize their pain points are not your own. Their desires are a far cry from yours. Their needs don’t include your product. 

And that influences you. It makes you rethink what you’re doing. Makes you question your vision.

Yesterday, Chris and I spent hours on a whiteboard at Cyberdyne cranking out ideas for the evolution of Shelby.tv. We walked away very proud of our work. Excited to show the team and already imagining the first lines of code that would make our wireframes reality. 

Today, however, we boarded a flight to ATL en route to Las Vegas for CES. As we look around - away from our office bubble, our tech startup bubble, hell… our NYC bubble - it’s a painful awakening that the average American may as well be from a different planet (or maybe it is we who are the aliens).

Most of the computer users on our flight now are on PC’s. Some are running Windows 2000. I think we even saw an Android tablet. (I kid… sort of). All (Apple) elitism aside, we mentioned picking up PC Mag to check the sentiment in that world… 

We also spent some time drawing wireframes on our iPads. When Chris proudly opened an app that gives you all the basic iOS elements to work with, Dan was quick to suggest that working with pre-defined elements is a guaranteed way to stifle creativity and any hope for doing something original.

It was a telling moment. We, as a team, spend a lot of time thinking through our vision for Shelby.tv. We love user feedback, yet most of it doesn’t make it into the product… and that’s OK. 

Like most things in life, balance is the key. 

Creators must be well-versed in the way the world works. They should travel, speak and study with others in and out of their bubbles. It is constant observation of daily life. But when it comes to building a product, allowing for too much outside influence isn’t necessarily the best path to creating an amazing experience. Creators must not be afraid of throwing away what they know and starting with a blank canvas. 

And those “aliens” I mentioned? Well if you’ve done anything original… anything that’s worth a damn… anything that creates some value… they’ll tell you. 

But they’ll tell you if it sucks, too.

So, study the world, then shut it off and build your vision. Go.